


Silence

by derangedfangirl



Series: Igneus Lux Lucis [2]
Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-10
Updated: 2011-12-10
Packaged: 2017-10-27 04:38:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/291709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/derangedfangirl/pseuds/derangedfangirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's not beautiful.  Shilo-centric.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silence

He’s not beautiful. 

Truly, she knows he’s not. 

 Not kind, generous, brave or true. 

She does know.   

  
She knows she doesn’t love him. 

   
He’s cold, hardened.

 A manipulator without morals, without pity. 

Without humanity.

 She just doesn’t care.

   
Nathan would’ve called it ‘charisma,’ with that speculative, scholarly expression she’d come to equate with obscure names from past decades, (names like ‘Koresh’, or ‘Manson’, who seem so laughably archaic). 

 Perhaps he would talk about the ‘psychological implications’, eyes lighting up the way they did when he was intensely interested in whatever he was teaching her _now_.

 Sometimes she wonders if he looks old, bleak, with the impenetrable expression she’d learned not to question and deep creases bracketing the hard line of his mouth.  If she’s aged him.  He hasn’t smiled –truly smiled– in years.  
   
Then she clenches her jaw, pushing back the complicated emotion, hating him for making her feel guilty, hating herself for her pathetic inability to stop caring.

 

So, instead, she considers her new protector. 

 She won’t idolize him, this sinuous, velvet tongued observer.  She won’t pretend he’s secretly a good man, that he’s just hurting, that she can fix him.   

   
She’ll not trust him, either. 

But she knows how long she’d last on the outside with no one to teach her.  She may be naive, but she’s not _that_ stupid.

So, she’ll do as she’s always done.  Keep her head down, her eyes open, and her fears, her dreams, the _true_ Shilo hidden.  And she knows, somehow, that he does the same. 

   
Sleep here is tense and brief, strangely urgent, never deep or blissful.  Neither mentions this eternal restlessness in a truce that’s no less binding for its lack of words.

   
She’s never met anyone who knows how to warp perceptions the way he does.  And the perpetually amused, self-proclaimed ‘king’ of the underworld who dances just on the edge of the psychotic is an elaborate lie.  A myth.

   
And she admires it, in a twisted way.  How deftly he slips in and out of each role, with total command over himself. 

   
Unlike the petulant Amber, however, she has no desire to see his masterful control slip.  She can’t help but be riveted at the woman’s attempts to out-maneuver the master of the art, anticipating the time when the patronizing irritation will become something brutally different.  It’s like a train wreck- she can’t tear her eyes away.

   
It’s the stifled violence that gives him away.  Barely reigned chaos. An air of not-quite-right frigidity that hangs about him in a tangible shroud when he thinks he’s unobserved. 

   
She recognizes the signs well.

 

Which is so _fucking_ unhealthy.

 

 _‘Trading one jailer for another, baby girl?’_   
__

She can’t even consider that, because she’s certain that if she does, she’ll start laughing and never, ever be able to stop, her mind fracturing as easily as a pane of glass.

 

No, she’ll stuff this… whatever it is… into some forgotten corner of her mind to pull out and examine later, when she has the time and constitution for it. 

 

Because she doesn’t love him.

Not at all.  

She’s simply mesmerized.

 

And it’s as lethal as her noxious blood.

 


End file.
